Silent films were never silent. From their earliest days as an exhibition attraction, motion pictures were accompanied by some form of music–typically a piano, a musical combo in more modest sized houses, and sometimes an entire orchestra in movie palaces. In some instances, the pianist was joined by a drummer employing sound effects, something I’ve always wanted to see and hear for myself.
I’d wager that we have more silent films in our collection than anywhere else in the world, and we always make a point of presenting them with accompaniment in the Packard Campus Theater. Andrew Simpson (a professor of composition at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.) and Ben Model (who also performs regularly at, among other places, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City) are our most frequently featured musicians, but we’ve hosted accompanists from all over the world.
Among our many grand ambitions is to make more silent films from our collections available online. For some time now we’ve been prioritizing the digitization of silent titles for just this purpose. It would be a relatively straightforward matter to put them online in what would essentially be their “native” form, that is, with no speed correction (most silent films were neither shot nor projected at 24 frames-per-second, which is “sound” speed) and with no score. For instance, the roughly 500 silent titles available on the Library’s American Memory site are speed corrected, but very few of them have scores. Now that’s fine for access–better a truly “silent” silent than nothing at all–but we would like to offer a better presentation whenever we can. So, we have developed a process by which we present online many silent films with scores composed specifically for them.